Salt Chronicle

The tide keeps its own accounts, depositing in the ledger of the shore a currency of broken shells and kelp, withdrawing what the dunes had saved for years.

I walked the wrack line after the storm and found a plank still wearing its blue paint, a name half-legible — someone's vessel once, now a sentence the sea refused to finish.

Salt does not forget. It enters the grain of every dock post, every mooring rope, every hand that hauled the nets at dawn and came home tasting of distance.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass on the windowsill where light could pass through it — amber, jade, the clouded white of milk teeth. Each piece a thing the ocean had argued sharp, then smoothed into a gift.

I hold one to my eye now and the world turns the color of old bottles, the color of years dissolving into something you can almost see through.